Watt is the second Samuel Beckett novel in English and a turning point in the writer's work. The book is characterized by a fuzzy indistinctly structured plot, language experiments in the description (at a certain stage), inarticulate absurd speech of the protagonist, abundant repetitions and the use of logical charade techniques, black humor and philosophical content.
Watt | |
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Watt | |
Genre | novel |
Author | Samuel Beckett |
Original language | English |
Date of writing | 1942-1945 |
Date of first publication | 1953 |
Publisher | Olympia Press |
Content
Creation History
Work on the novel, largely critical in the work of Beckett, the writer began in the south of France in Roussillon while in forced races during World War II. The period of writing the book is one of the darkest in the life of the writer, who, because of his participation in the French Resistance, actually hung in the balance. The book was released only in 1953.
Characters
- Watt (key character, Mr. Nott's servant, then a vagabond and a psychiatric patient)
- Nott (the mysterious host that Watt serves)
- Arsen (one of the storytellers, the predecessor of Watt in the place of Mr. Nott's servant)
- Sam (one of the storytellers, also the patient of the hospital where Watt eventually ends up)
- Ernest Luit (character of the “false” story, ethnographer and charlatan, author of the study “The Mathematical Sense of the West Celts”).
Contents
The novel consists of 4 parts, the chronological links between them are broken. The formal plot, rather conditional and devoid of traditional fictional twists (love, betrayal, deed turning in fate), is in a rather monotonous history of a certain gentleman named Watt, who serves the service of Mr. Nott. In the second part of the novel, Watt tries to make sense of what is happening in Mr. Nott’s house and its role in it. Watt does little, while Watt stays in Mr. Nott’s house a few strange incidents, and Watt still fails to find out anything definite about Mr. Nott, who invariably eludes any meaningful description. In the third part (the narrator this time is a certain Sam), Watt is in an orphanage for the insane, he has practically lost the gift of articulate speech, the narration is interrupted by "false stories" that have no clear connection with the main plot line. In the shortest fourth part of the book, Watt’s path from Mr. Nott’s home to the railway station is described, on arrival, Watt loses his mind and goes to a psychiatric hospital, where he finds himself in the third part.
Topics and meaning
“Watt” is a turning point in the work of the writer and marks a break with early poetics, marked by the strongest influence of James Joyce , and the movement towards innovative visual tools that have become the brand name of the writer.
“Watt” touches upon the themes of impossibility of communication, agnosticism, lostness and helplessness of a person, which have become classic for mature and late Beckett, not only in the face of the universe, but also in the face of the depths of one’s self. In “Watt,” Jungian motifs (the dichotomy of two main characters, “Watt-Nott” can be viewed as a juxtaposition of consciousness and the unconscious), as well as a controversy with Christian doctrine and Cartesianism , clearly show through.
Thus, the modern Russian explorer of Beckett D.V. Tokarev writes:
“ Watt, Descartes's heir, obsessed with a thirst for knowledge, he does not tolerate when things whose names were known to him suddenly cease to be so, lose their habitual appearance. And that is exactly what is happening in the house of Mr. Nott; words seem to be “unstuck” from objects, and in order to assign a new name to an object or return an old one to it, Watt has to build endless series of assumptions and assumptions ” [1] .
One of the key themes of the novel is the deconstruction of the speech of the main character. The above-mentioned D.V. Tokarev draws a parallel between the inarticulate muttering of Watt, a metaphor for the impossibility of cognition and understanding, and the “insanity” of Russian futurists - A. Kruchenykh , V. Khlebnikov [2] .
Mr. Nott can be safely considered the predecessor and immediate forerunner of Godot . Nott is unknowable, indefinable and defies rational comprehension. In a certain sense, in opposition to Watt and Nott, one can see the conflict between Jesus Christ and God the Father . Bekketovsky the narrator directly compares the insane and wandering through the hospital park Watt with the Savior:
“ The face was covered with blood, the hands, too, and the spines stuck in the scalp. (His then resemblance to Christ in the representation of Bosch, which hung at that time on Trafalgar Square, was so striking that I noted this. ) ”(Translated by P. Molchanov) [3] .
The idea of the Old Testament cruelty of God, his indifference to man finds expression in the following passage:
“ But our main friends were the rats who lived behind the stream. Long so black. We brought them such dishes from our table, like cheese peels and delicious cartilage; we also dragged bird eggs, frogs and chicks to them. Susceptible to these signs of attention, they scurried around at our appearance, showing confidence and appreciation, climbed over our pant legs and hung on the chest. Then we sat down in the midst of them and fed them from the hands of a glorious fat frog or Drozdenka. Or, suddenly grabbing a well-fed rat who was resting on our stomach after a meal, we gave him to the mercy of his mother, or father, or brother, or sister, or even some less fortunate relative. It was in such cases, we decided, after an exchange of views, that we became closer to God ”(translated by P. Molchanov).
Russian edition
- 2004 - book edition of the Russian translation: Samuel Beckett. Watt / Per. from English P. Molchanov. - M .: Eksmo, 2004. - 416 p. ISBN 5-699-07308-6
See also
- Cartesianism
- Christianity
- Existence of God
Notes
- ↑ D.V. Tokarev. Imagination Dead Imagine: Samuel Beckett's French Prose / D.V. Tokarev. - St. Petersburg: Science, 2003.
- ↑ D.V. Tokarev. Course for the worst: absurd as a category of text in Daniel. Kharms and Samuel Beckett / D.V. Tokarev. - M.: New lit. Review, 2002.
- ↑ Samuel Beckett. Watt / translated by P. Molchanov - M.: Eksmo, 2004.